Don’t Forget to Take Care of Yourself!

Margie and I wrote a wonderful book with Dee Edington years ago called The One Minute Manager Gets Fit. And then we reissued it as The One Minute Manager Balances Life and Work. The whole concept was that we need to take care of our health. We need to take care of our bodies. We had a wonderful little saying in there about how, early in life, you give up your health to gain wealth—in other words, we work hard. We want to accomplish goals. We want to take care of our families and all, and we don’t exercise, and we overeat, and we drink too much, and all. And then later in life—you know, health costs at the end of people’s lives are amazing—people give up their wealth to regain their health. They’re trying to patch things up and all that. So one of the things I’ve really decided is that we have a lot of good wellness activities in the company and I really want to start getting involved in those. We have our room where we can go on the treadmill and exercise and things like that, and I’m sure your company is the same way. We really need to take care of ourselves—particularly in these tough times. You need to think about your health and what you can do to take care of it.

So my thought today is to take a look in the mirror and be honest with yourself—are you eating right? Are you drinking right? Are you exercising? Are you taking care of yourself? Because you owe it not only to yourself, but to your family and to your company.